I left the office early this afternoon to have enough time to get to Roath for the opening ceremony of Cardiff Steiner Education Initiative's new kindergarten building, housed in the century old former Saint Anne's Parish infants school, which closed last summer.
Representatives of the Parish and previous school were present, also parents with children and a group of former pupils from the past decade of the kindergarten's existence in its Iron Street building in nearby Adamsdown. These took part in the opening ceremony.
It was a lovely occasion. Anna, one of the school's founding staff members, who told a story, also Russel the school's eminent mentor. A moving contribution was made by a Sudanese Sufi Sheikh. He reminisced about his childhood by the Nile, living close to nature. He stated how Steiner education reminded him of the spiritual values that nourished him, and how pleased he was to advise and support Muslim parents to send their children to the kindergarten. Fr. Stuart Lisk, Vicar of Roath spoke about the death and resurrection of the school. It was a happy day for him, as he was Chair of the old school's governors, faced with accepting the heart breaking closure decision due to decline in pupil numbers.
Steiner education's creative approach to pedagogy garners parental support from people far and wide. Parents and staff work together as genuine stakeholders to form a self supporting learning community truly centred on the world of childhood development. It achieves government targeted aspirations for learners, albeit by a different route along which creativity, co-operation and spiritual awareness of the world and each other all play a vital part in the child's schooling.
The Church in Wales' partnership with the state in its schooling programme strives hard and often excellently to achieve similar educational aspirations, but this is not without compromise, because of the way all teachers are trained and shaped by the experience of dependency as part of a large public service institution. In effect, schools (State and Church Voluntary Aided) are clients of the Local Education Authority. Pupils and their parents are clients of the school. Public bodies, both church and state are perennially subject to the vagaries of politics and finance. Running them always seems to involve excessive amounts of change management and trouble shooting, draining energy from the essentials of pedagogy.
Small community stakeholder engagement behind Steiner education is much more demanding in some ways on parents and teachers, but gives much more to the children, consistently enabling each one to rise to their potential. It succeeds in meeting the kind of aspirations Church schools strive to maintain in their altogether different organisational model. I'm thankful this initiative flourishes, not least because of the inspirational example it sets in local early years schooling.
